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Introduction

The question of when it is best to publish a blog post has been asked many times.  It has been answered by some very fine bloggers.  In this article perhaps surprisingly we will not answer the question.  The reason is that there is no answer that will always be right.  The Internet changes at an explosive speed and the answers that may have been correct two years ago may not be correct now.  In this article we will explore some of the current issues that influence the best time to publish a blog post. (more…)

In an earlier post we described How To Write Engaging Blog Posts.  What wasn’t covered was how long that blog post should be.  There is no single right answer to that question but we will suggest what you should take into account as you write your own blog posts. (more…)

Linkbait is a term you may already know well. If not, linkbait can be quickly defined as a type of content, often a blog entry or photo, that has massively general appeal and lends itself to viral distribution. For instance, if you find this post to be exceptionally helpful and you think most of your friends would also enjoy it, you’ll send them a link. Chances are your friends will also enjoy what you sent them and forward the content in turn. This entire process is made simple by social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Sphinn, and Del.ico.us that allow you to “click through” content recommended content. If you are not already signed up with one or more social bookmarking services, take a few minutes and get an account. Understanding how a system promotes your content will prove very helpful when you sit down to write a piece you’d like to see promoted. (more…)

There are more and more bloggers all the time and usually they want to do it well.  What characterizes a good blog post?  It is not as easy a question as you might think.  Here we will explore what is involved.

The single blog post

Any exploration of the quality of a blog post must start with the content.  Just imagine the blog post printed out on a sheet of paper.  It probably will not appeal to everyone.  What counts is its intended audience.  How does this blog post appeal to a typical reader from the target audience?  Unless this much simpler replica of the blog post works for this reader, it is unlikely to be effective when it goes live on the Web.

Considering this replica, we can understand that the headings and layout of the page and the images, if any, will all be important in determining the reader’s liking for or dislike of the blog post.  The copywriter’s skills are important here in crafting appealing content.  So it must work at this level but there are other factors involved once it goes live online. (more…)

We are not talking about poultry or vegetables here. However, when we search on a search engine for “farm blogs,” most of the results that come up are blogs about different kinds of vegetable farms, chicken farms or even owl farms. However, turn it the other way round and type “blog farms” and you are taken into the world of blogs pertaining to internet marketing.

Blog farming has been around for a few years now. For people who are not aware of what blog farming is – this practice is nothing exotic and just a collection of blogs that are created to get back links to the sites.

Blogs are created and populated with unique content and then they are used to build back links to a destination money site, which is an AdSense site.

People who are into blog farming aim at getting the seemingly invaluable back links by the “blog and ping” method. This is said to get the sites crawled by search engine spiders and the AdSense pages indexed quickly and into the SERPs. This method is also said to make the search engines immediately notice whenever content is posted in the blogs as well as make them follow all the back links to the sites.

Many blogs within the blog farms cleverly (or is it detrimentally?) use actual content that is available through RSS feeds from other blogs or from other free sites. With so many blog farmers out there on the Web, this means that if someone is actually posting unique content on their blogs, there is every chance that some blog farmer or some such internet marketer grabs (steals) the content and repackages it. These people may not even credit the owner of the content. (more…)